Death Takes a Ride (The Cate Kinkaid Files Book #3): A Novel

by Lorena McCourtney

  “Who are you?”

  Cate sometimes wished she had a better imagination, but the only name that came to mind was her own. “Cate Kinkaid.”

  “You work for H&B?” Andy asked.

  “No. I’m in a business that, um, sometimes finds people for other people.” Cate started to pull out a Belmont Investigations card, but she felt a sudden reluctance to provide him with any further way to connect with her.

  “He paid you to find me?” Andy said.

  “That’s my job.” She shoved the card deeper in her pocket.

  Halliday had said Andy had nervous eyes, and Cate saw them in 3-D action now. Eyes that flicked from door to her to bike to Lily, with a long stop at the end to squint into space while he thought about something. Probably not quantum physics.

  “How much?” he demanded.

  “How much will he pay for the bike? I don’t—”

  “How much did he pay you to find me?”

  “I haven’t calculated the bill yet.”

  “You sure you don’t owe this guy money or something, and that’s why he sent her looking for you?” Lily demanded with a hands-on-hips glare at Andy.

  Cate didn’t wait for Andy to try to soothe Lily with assurances about his credit rating. “So I’ll just be running along now,” she said brightly, as if this had been a pleasant social visit. “I’ll tell him you’re living here, and he can contact you.”

  “Well, I dunno,” Andy said. Cate could almost see dollar signs playing tag in his head, and he sounded cagey, as if he figured that now he could afford to play hard to get with the bike. “If it’s the stuffed shirt I talked to at H&B, he wasn’t all that nice to me.”

  “Nice, nasty, who cares?” Lily threw up her hands in exasperation. “Sell the bike. I’m tired of it sitting in our living room like a big ugly pet we have to pamper.” To Cate she added, “He acts like I should bow down every time I pass by it.”

  “Why do you keep it in the living room?” Cate asked Andy.

  Andy frowned, as if this were an irrelevant question. “It’s a valuable old bike, a real classic.” Andy moved a few steps to rub a smudge on a fender. Which seemed like an exercise in futility given all the dents and rusty spots elsewhere on the bike. “Very hard to find a ’48 Indian these days. I’m not leaving it out where someone can steal or vandalize it.”

  Lily crossed her arms over her chest. “I think your opinion of its value is highly overrated.”

  Cate thought that might be true too, although she didn’t comment. Apparently Andy considered the old bike a prime investment, his personal IRA.

  “Oh, I think Halliday is going to be willing to pay plenty.” Andy’s smile and nod were smug, as if he knew something neither Lily or Cate knew about bike values. “How’re things going out there at H&B now? I heard on the news they had kind of a messy shootout there.”

  “Yes, there was,” Cate agreed.

  “One man dead, another one almost dead,” Andy observed. “But business is still chugging along?”

  “All I know is that Mr. Halliday is interested in buying your bike.”

  Andy unlocked the door, all the polite, considerate host now. “You don’t need to tell Mr. Halliday anything. I’ll get in touch with him myself. I might be at work or something if he called or came here.”

  “Work?” Lily said, as if work and Andy were an unlikely combination.

  Andy opened the door and motioned Cate toward it, apparently eager to be rid of her now. “I’ll call him and set up an appointment. You don’t have to do anything. In fact, I’d rather you didn’t.”

  Halliday didn’t want her to talk to Andy; Andy didn’t want her to talk to Halliday. It sounded to Cate like a strange way to do business. But then, choreographing their negotiations was not in her job description anyway.

  Cate wiped her feet on the newspapers so she wouldn’t track more muddy water across the carpet. At the door, she looked back at Lily.

  “If you’re worried about your ex-husband, it might help to get a restraining order against him.”

  Cate knew something about restraining orders. She and Uncle Joe had worked on a stalking case in which the stalker had turned out to be the guy’s ex-wife.

  “I don’t know how to do that.”

  “You can go to the police and fill out a form. Or there’s a free legal aid service where you can get help. They’re in the phone book. I think you can get a temporary order right away, and then you go before a judge to have it made permanent. Just be sure you know specific dates when he harassed or threatened you, and what he said or did.”

  “You don’t need any restraining order,” Andy scoffed. “I can take care of you. Or maybe we’ll just take off and go someplace better.”

  “We don’t have any money.”

  “We will have. Plenty of money. Soon.”

  “The bike can’t bring that much.” Lily gave it a glance that would wither whole cornfields. “It isn’t even running. We had to haul it over here in the pickup.”

  “You just wait and see.”

  “Mr. Halliday seemed to think you were kind of high on your price before,” Cate warned. “If you really want to sell, it might be best to put a realistic price on the bike.”

  “I know how to deal with Halliday.”

  Lily came to the door and elbowed Andy out of the way. “Thanks,” she said to Cate. “I really appreciate the information about a restraining order.”

  Andy got in the last word to Cate, however. “Remember, you don’t say anything to Halliday about me. I’ll take care of it.”

  16

  Cate drove home with the scent of garlic still thick in her nose. Which was because, she realized when she walked into the house and the smell was still with her, it had also saturated her clothes. A new hazard connected with the PI business that she’d never anticipated. Was wardrobe contamination an acceptable business deduction on your income tax return? Although Octavia seemed more interested in than repelled by the scent.

  Octavia followed Cate into the bathroom and curled up on the garlic-scented clothes Cate tossed on the floor. Now she’d have a garlic-scented cat? After showering and washing her hair, Cate went to the computer in her office to write up a report for Matt Halliday. Andy had said she didn’t need to give Halliday any information, that he’d rather contact the man himself.

  She wouldn’t go along with what Andy wanted. Halliday was her client, not Andy. Using information from the notebook she kept in her purse, she listed dates, times, who she’d contacted, and what she’d done on the case, hours and minutes it had taken her, miles she’d traveled.

  The report told Halliday what she’d learned about the location of the motorcycle and Andy. But when she was correcting punctuation and grammar, she noticed a time didn’t seem right. She turned away to retrieve the notebook to check for accuracy, and when she returned to the computer, she found Octavia strolling across the keyboard.

  Cate looked on the screen at what the cat tracks had written: ‘pl/ijmbgyesx. Octavia plopped down on her rump beside the computer and looked up expectantly.

  “And that is … what?” Cate asked. “Advice? Compliment on a job well done? Dinner order?”

  Octavia flicked her tail and batted a pen off the edge of the desk, which Cate interpreted as exasperation with Cate’s denseness. Cate studied the letters on the computer screen again.

  “This doesn’t make any sense at all,” she finally declared. “So don’t expect me to believe you’re giving me some important message in code.”

  Although an unexpected wave of apprehension shivered up her spine. Was Octavia’s peculiar sixth sense perceiving something and trying to warn her? That perhaps the situation wasn’t exactly as it seemed, and unknown dangers lurked?

  “No way,” she said firmly. “It’s just cat gibberish.”

  A quick delete took care of the strange line of letters.

  Case closed!

  She printed out two copies of the report, one for Halliday and one for t
he files. Uncle Joe didn’t trust having records on the computer only; he wanted paper copies too.

  Next morning, reading the newspaper, she saw a big feature article interviewing both Halliday and Shirley about the shootings at H&B, with photos. There were letters to the editor too, several readers praising Halliday for his quick reaction. Somehow she doubted Halliday would be pleased, even though everything lauded him as a hero. He didn’t seem to like the limelight.

  Cate called and discussed the amount of the bill for Halliday with Uncle Joe. He’d seen the article and letters too. Afterward, instead of mailing or faxing both report and bill, Cate decided to run them out to H&B. She wanted to remind Shirley that this evening was the second Fit and Fabulous session.

  Cate was surprised to see a police car pulling out of the H&B lot when she arrived. Did that mean they were still investigating the events that had happened here? The Corvette was no longer in the lot.

  Inside, Halliday’s office door was open. Cate gave Radine a little wave and went directly to the open door.

  “I have a report for you,” Cate said from the doorway. She held up the envelope. “About Andy Timmons and his motorcycle.”

  Halliday shoved some papers aside. He was in the khaki coveralls all the H&B people except Radine wore, smear of grease on the sleeve, and he smelled like her dad when he came in from working on his old tractor.

  Halliday’s creased forehead and compressed mouth looked serious and worried, but then that was how he usually looked. As if he lived under a dark cloud from which bad news could rain down at any moment. “Already? Good work. Come on in.”

  Cate stepped inside and handed the envelope to him. He opened it, skimmed what she’d written, and glanced at the bill. No explosion there. Good. It was in the report how Timmons had ambushed her in the puddle, but she now offered an expanded explanation about why she’d had to tell him Halliday was interested in the bike. “I hope this doesn’t complicate your negotiations with Mr. Timmons.”

  He waved a hand, dismissing her concerns. “I’m just sorry you had to go through that. I suspected Timmons was sneaky and unreliable, but maybe he’s also more dangerous than I realized.”

  “All in the day of a private investigator,” Cate assured him. “As it says in the report, Timmons plans to contact you himself, so you’ll probably hear from him soon.”

  “Actually, the situation has changed, and I don’t think I’m interested in buying the bike after all. I talked to the client just this morning, and he said he’d bought an old Indian bike over in Idaho.” Halliday frowned, but he added a little shrug that suggested that was just an everyday business annoyance.

  He opened the desk drawer and pulled out a checkbook. He wrote out the check for Belmont Investigations himself rather than having Radine do it. He held it out to her. “I appreciate your good work.”

  “Thanks. We appreciate the prompt payment.” She tucked the check in her purse. “Good interview in the newspaper this morning.”

  “I felt like an idiot when I read it.” Halliday grimaced. “When you see something you’ve said in print, it comes out different than what you intended to say.”

  “People writing to the editor really approved what you did.”

  “Those I appreciated.”

  “Well, um, if you ever need anything else, Belmont Investigations is available.”

  “You never know.”

  “I see the police were here again,” Cate said tentatively. “I thought their investigation was concluded by now.”

  “There was that fire at the hospital. The police now seem to think it could be connected with what happened to Kane. It really worries me.”

  “Connected how?”

  “They didn’t spell it out for me. You know police. But they asked questions about clients Kane may have had problems with. Also relationship problems, personal enemies, financial problems. They didn’t get to people who didn’t like his dog, but they covered everything else. But I think what they have in mind is that someone may have been trying to get to Kane right there at the hospital. To finish him off.”

  “You mean that his original shooting here could have been something more than a robbery? That Kane was an intentional target? And someone is still out to get him?”

  “That’s what it looks to me like they’re considering.”

  Halliday stood up. He arched his back and rubbed his neck as if both were tight with tension. “What I’m thinking is, if it involves some kind of grudge against H&B …”

  Maybe they’d come after him too.

  Unexpectedly, he offered both a smile and another grimace. “Listen to me. Kane is in the hospital with his life on the line, and I’m worried about some weirdo coming after me.”

  “Have they ever connected the gunman to any dealings with H&B?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “So they’re thinking someone may have hired him to kill Mr. Blakely?”

  Halliday smiled ruefully. “The police don’t include me in their loop.”

  Yeah. Cate too.

  “So maybe he was a hired assassin, or maybe it was some conspiracy of buddies out to get him,” Halliday added. “I don’t know.”

  “Is there any specific customer you think could have been unhappy enough to do this?”

  “Not really. Although even in the best of businesses, there are always a few unhappy customers. Recently, one guy was all bent out of shape because the charge on restoring his old LaSalle came in considerably higher than we’d estimated. Or Kane may have had problems up at the Salem branch that he didn’t tell me about.” He paused. “And then there’s Candy, of course.”

  “Is this something you want Belmont Investigations to check into?”

  Halliday frowned as if considering that, then shook his head. “Not at this time, no. Maybe I’m reading something into the police thinking that isn’t there. This whole situation has been—and is—very disturbing.”

  “I see Mr. Blakely’s Corvette is no longer in the parking lot. Did the police take it?”

  “No. I had one of our employees tow it around to the shop and put it inside to keep it safe. Kane would be really upset if anything happened to it.”

  “Good idea. Is it okay if I step out in the warehouse and talk to Shirley for a minute?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  Cate found Shirley in the middle of the warehouse, head tilted toward an upper shelf. Jerry, the string-bean guy who’d loaned her a pickup, was moving a ladder on its rails to a different position on a shelf, his coveralls streaked with the trademark grease of anyone who worked here. Shirley put a foot on the ladder, but he kept a hand on it.

  “I can do this for you.”

  “Jerry, it’s my job.”

  Shirley briskly started up the ladder and climbed to the top shelf. Jerry’s worried gaze followed her every movement. She came down carrying one of those unidentifiable car parts. She handed it to Jerry and spotted Cate. “Hey, Cate, hi!”

  “I had to come out and see Mr. Halliday, so I thought I’d stop in for a minute.”

  “I’d better get back out to the shop. Thanks for locating the generator for the Olds.” Jerry headed for the open door on the far side of the warehouse. Cate suspected he was disappointed that her appearance had shortened his brief time with Shirley.

  Shirley went back to a big box on the floor beside her computer.

  “We’ve had some stuff coming down from Salem. I’m cataloguing these hood ornaments right now.”

  “Because Mr. Halliday is closing the Salem branch?”

  “I guess.” Shirley’s frown suggested she wasn’t particularly pleased about that, no doubt because of Kane.

  “I saw you got interviewed by the newspaper.”

  “Yeah. And some magazine in Portland called too. But I didn’t do anything with them. It all makes me feel kind of … slimy. Like I’m capitalizing on Kane getting shot.”

  Cate had been right. Neither Halliday nor Shirley were publicity hounds. She peer
ed into the box. The mixture of silvery, gold-toned, and bronze ornaments weren’t individually wrapped, just jumbled together. A dolphin. A football player. Silvery steer horns, a foot and a half wide. She picked up an upright metal bear, surprisingly heavy when she hefted it in one hand.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen any of these on cars.”

  “Some brands of vehicles use specific ornaments, like the ram figure for Dodges, but these are random ones some company made. Mr. Halliday said Kane must have picked them up on a company closeout. Sometimes a customer wants something, you know, different. Jerry said they mounted real steer horns on a pickup once. Though I don’t know who’d want this.”

  Shirley picked up an oddly diabolical-looking goldy figure with big feet and a peaked hat. Clown? Witch? It was hard to tell.

  “I’ll just catalogue them and stick the whole box up on a shelf somewhere. We may never use them. How’s Clancy doing with Mitch?” Shirley added.

  “Great. We took him out for a run in the country on Sunday afternoon. Anything new with Kane?”

  “I don’t think he’s getting any better,” Shirley said gloomily. Then she determinedly brightened. “But I don’t know that he’s any worse either. His son is here now.”

  “What’s he like?”

  Shirley lifted a shoulder. “Oh, okay, I guess. I introduced myself, but we didn’t actually talk much.”

  Not much enthusiasm from Shirley for the son, and Cate figured the guy had just blown her off. He wasn’t making any pass at Shirley, as Candy had said he’d done with her.

  “What about the ex-wife?”

  “I think she went back to Salem when Kane’s son got here.”

  “How’d your dinner with Jerry go?”

  “Just fine.” Her sturdy face brightened. “He really liked the fried chicken and apple pie, and we played chess afterward. Hatch and I used to play chess a lot out on the boat. Jerry got my pickup fixed, so I gave him back the one he loaned me.”

  Cate wanted to put in a plug for Jerry, what a great guy he seemed to be, but she doubted it would do any good right now. Shirley had a fixation on Kane.